Page 28 of Waters that Drown Us
“Tell me what you need,” I say, my mouth still so close to her chest. My tongue instinctively runs along my back molar to check the cap. It’s still in place. Which is good, because my body is screaming to do more, give her more.
“You’re doing so good,” she praises. A combination of pleasure and irritation floods my chest, because I love hearing the words, but she didn’t tell me what she wants. I latch my mouth around her nipple again, harder this time, barely pulling with my teeth.
“Jesu—” she starts, only to be cut off when I roll her nipple between my teeth again. “More, Alice. Fuck me like you mean it.”
I slip a second finger inside her, pumping in and out, desperate to push her over the edge as she’s done for me dozens of times now. The water around us isn’t nearly as calm as it was before, but that’s not the fault of the currents or the weather. Instead, it’s Emily’s efforts to keep up floating, less and less controlled with every kick of her legs. Still, she keeps me buoyed well above the surface.
“Give me more, pretty girl. Make me come.”
Her eyes are locked on mine as I pull away from her chest and fuck her with three fingers. Testing her strength, I leverage my grip on her shoulder to fuck into her as hard as I can. Her mouth drops open a little, bottom lip so red from biting into it that I almost lose all self control and kiss her. Her eyes flick tomy lips too, and it only takes a few more pumps into her pussy to feel her clench around me.
Her muscles flex around my hand, her whole body shuddering as she comes for me, because of me. A broken string of cries and curses in Spanish and a few other languages, if my memory serves me, come streaming from her as she keeps coming. Every cell of my body is on fire as I watch her come apart and stitch herself back together, seemingly forcing herself back down to earth so she can watch as I draw her pleasure out.
She takes in everything, her eyes with their blown out pupils surveying every inch of me. I can feel them on my skin from my lips to my shoulders, to where I’m still pumping my fingers inside her. Like she’s trying to capture every detail, creating an image she can keep in her mind forever.
I know I’m projecting. But that’s what I want to do. Take a photo in my mind of this moment that I can relive over and over. In my loneliest moments, when I wonder if all I’ve ever brought to this world is pain and death, I can remember Emily and how she let me be something good for her, even if only for a moment.
“Damn it Alice, what are you doing to me?” she asks, and I can’t pretend not to hear the meaning in her words. The desperation I feel too. It’s too much, too fast, too impossible, and for all the wrong reasons. But there’s no denying the screaming desire to wrap myself in her and never let go.
It’s not real. It’s my heart’s desperate attempt to feel something akin to love before I die. It’s not fair, to me but especially to her.
And still, I slip my fingers from her and wrap around her, so my head rests against her chest and the sound of her heartbeat drowns out all my thoughts.
-
“You can’t plan allthe adventures, you know,” Emily says, her hand clutching mine as we walk down the only real road in Nesika Beach. We brought the boat back and showered in Emily’s motel room—which resulted in a multitude of reciprocal orgasms—before I relayed part two of my plan for the day.
“This is hardly an adventure,” I scoff, wrapping my free hand around her bicep and leaning into her shoulder as we walk. “We’re just window shopping in the world’s most desolate mall.”
She leans down and kisses the top of my head, and I realize how much I was really missing as a teenager, even when I learned of my negotiated engagement with Ilya. Every second with Emily feels like I’m floating, like my body is lighter than air. My heartbeat is constantly uneven, and my skin feels prickly with awareness. I crave her attention, her affection, her gentle touch, equally as much as I do her more carnal desires. I never realized that by denying myself something as simple as a crush when I was young, I was missing out on something that felt so good.
All the reasons I have to feel guilty—whether reasonable or not, born from my father’s control or my actions—are so much quieter. It’s selfish. It’swrong.
I smell her cologne, and wonder how long I’ll hate myself if I live and she dies.
“Tell me about this place, I’ve only been to the discount store,” she suggests as we walk down the sidewalk, overgrown with weeds and dandelions. The paint of the designated parking spots on the empty street is faded.
“Well, there’s a church, two bars, the discount store, a pawn shop, and three vacant buildings on this road,” I say, pointing. “The other motel is at the opposite end of the road, but yours is the nicer one.”
“A low bar,” she mutters, and I poke a blunt fingernail into her ribs.
“Be nice,” I scorn. “There’s the boat tours and the bait shop by the docks, of course. And there used to be a cheap little gift shop, but the owner didn’t come back this summer, so it never reopened.”
We walk by one of the empty storefronts, the glass spiderwebbed in one of the windows. All of the stores are on the east side of the road; the other side doesn’t even have a sidewalk, asphalt transitioning seamlessly into a dirt turnoff, and then grass, and then shrubbery, and then the trees that fill every inch of space until you hit the cliffs.
“I feel like the checkout lady hates me,” Emily whispers as we walk by the discount store, Luanne sits on her high stool at the only checkout row, blatantly staring at us through the window. A smile pulls at the corner of my mouth, and I raise my hand to wiggle my fingers at her. She waves back, her brows still knitted in confusion.
“People here aren’t great with change,” I say, shrugging my shoulders as we meander. “It took me staying through at least a winter before they got used to me.”
“Too bad I’m only here for the summer,” she says, the end of her sentence trailing like she regrets the words coming out of her mouth. She squeezes my hand, but the air still feels a little more tense as our pace slows.
She thinks she’ll only be here for the summer because that’s how long her research grant is supporting her. I wonder if she’s waiting for me to ask what comes after. If we’ll keep in touch. If we’ll see each other again.
She could be dead in a few weeks. So could I. And even if we both live, there’s no next summer for us. The fantasy that I’ll buy a phone just so I can talk to her, the dream that she’d ask me to come with her wherever her research takes her next—none of that is possible. So I keep my mouth shut and squeeze her hand back.
For the first time, I regret my mithridatism. It would likely be easier to let the poison kill Ilya and I at the same time, so I didn’t have to live with the guilt, so I didn’t have to live in a world without her.
As we walk, I allow myself to imagine a best-case-scenario. Ilya comes, because my father would never deign to leave his stronghold for something as unimportant as his wayward and traitorous daughter. Ilya doesn’t kill anyone to get to me, but waits until I’m alone in my apartment. He might even keep me here for a while, to get his revenge for embarrassing him by faking my death before bringing me back to Russia.